Dryden

Dryden, JOHN, was born at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, on the 9th of August 1631. His father, Erasmus Dryden (the name until the poet's manhood was more usually spelt Drīden), was a cadet of a family of Border origin, which some generations before had settled at Canons Ashby, in the same county, but at some distance from Aldwinkle. The poet's mother was Mary Pickering, and it was at her father's house (the rectory of the parish of Aldwinkle All Saints) that Dryden was born. Very little is known of his early youth, but he seems to have passed it chiefly at Tichmarsh, near Aldwinkle, where his maternal grandfather also had property. He was entered at Westminster School when he was twelve years old, and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, when he was nineteen, being matriculated on July 16, and elected to a Westminster scholarship on October 2. On July 19, 1652, he was punished slightly for some offence against discipline, and this is all that is positively known about his Cambridge career, except that he took his bachelor's degree in 1654. He never proceeded to the M.A., preferring to take that degree from Lambeth, and he seems on the whole to have had little affection for Cambridge. His father died in the same year (1654), and Dryden succeeded to two-thirds, and after his mother's death to the whole, of a small estate at Blakesley near Canons Ashby, then worth £60 a year, where he seems never to have resided. He, after the fashion of the time, continued to live at Cambridge till 1657, and then he went to London. Both the Drydens and the Pickerings were strong parliamentarians, and

Dryden seems to have had some, but vain, hopes of patronage from his cousin Sir Gilbert Pickering, a favourite of Cromwell. It is thought that he began early to do work for the booksellers, especially Herringman, a then frequent employer of young authors; but again we have little or no positive information respecting him till December 1, 1663, when he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and sister of two not unknown men of letters who were Dryden's friends. Much scandal has been talked about this marriage on absolutely no solid ground, but it seems probable that it was not wholly happy, and that Lady Elizabeth, whose intellect was certainly not strong, may have had a bad temper. Three sons, Charles, John, and Erasmus Henry, were the offspring, and from this time Dryden occasionally resided at his father-in-law's Wiltshire seat of Charlton. He had several London residences, the best known of which was in Gerrard Street, Soho, a house now marked with a tablet. Very shortly after the wedding, Pepys on the 3d of February 1664 met Dryden, 'the poet I knew at Cambridge,' at Will's Coffee-house, and this is the first of the personal notices (very few in number) that we have of the poet.

The dramatic work of which further notice will be taken shortly now occupied Dryden almost entirely for many years—for no less than fourteen he wrote next to nothing but drama. He was made poet-laureate and historiographer-royal in 1670, the emoluments of which places (£200 a year) were increased by a pension of £100 in 1679. Some literary disputes and a quarrel with the malevolent Rochester, which brought Dryden on the 8th December 1679 a eudgelling by masked bravoes, are almost the only events of importance in this long period. The disturbances in public opinion which followed the Popish Plot provoked the splendid series of satires beginning with Absalom and Achitophel, and brought an increasing storm of libels in prose and verse on Dryden's head from the other side. In 1683, as part compensation for great arrears in his salary, and perhaps also as reward for his political services, a collectorship of customs in the port of London was granted him, but the value of this place is not known. In the epidemic of conversion which followed the accession of James II., Dryden was one of the chief seceders from the Church of England, and his sincerity in this act has been violently impugned. Controversy on such a point being here impossible, it must be sufficient to say that his previous state of mind on the subject appears to have been exactly that half-scepticism, with a kind of yearning for authoritative certainty, which has constantly disposed men to Roman Catholicism; that he gained (as can be proved) not one penny by the change of faith; and that he adhered to it when others 'reverted,' and when his own constancy inflicted the heaviest loss upon him. At the Revolution he did not take the oaths, and thus lost all his places and pensions. To supply this loss, he then returned to play-writing, and to the less uncongenial, if not quite so profitable work of translation. During the last ten years of his life (which saw the production of his famous translation of Virgil, and of the collection of his most accomplished verse called the Fables) we have, thanks to the accidental preservation of letters, a few more personal details about Dryden than at other times. Almost immediately after the publication of the last-named volume (at the end of 1699), an attack of gout, from which disease he had always suffered much, set in, and resulting in mortification of the toe, carried him off on May-day 1700. He was splendidly buried in Westminster Abbey. All his sons died before their mother, who lived till 1714, and was insane at the time of her death. The youngest, however, Erasmus Henry, had succeeded to the family honours and baronetcy, and to the estate of Canons Ashby, which, by a female descent, are still in the name.

Dryden's great literary work began early, though not plentifully or very promisingly, with some poems in the 'metaphysical' manner of Donne and Cleveland; but his stanzas on the death of Cromwell, though lacking ease and flow, have great merit, and the group of panegyrical poems, written after the Restoration, beginning with Astræa Redux and ending with Annus Mirabilis, exhibit wonderful command of a style of verse not hitherto attempted. Then, as has been said, Dryden turned all his energies for many years into dramatic work, which he confesses to have been distasteful to him, and which was done for profit simply. Between The Wild Gallant (1663) and Love Triumphant (1694) he produced a great number of plays, the best of which are the Conquest of Granada (1670), Marriage à la Mode (1672), Aurungzeb (1675), All for Love (1677), The Spanish Friar (1681), and Don Sebastian (1689). The comedies are disfigured by a double portion of the license in language and situation which was common at the time, and the earlier tragedies by their unnatural rhymed dialogue, and by the frantic rant of style which was fashionable; but they occasionally contain, especially in interspersed lyrics, and in a few set speeches, extremely fine poetry. It was Dryden's practice, too, to prefix or append to the published versions of these plays, essays which developed his astonishing talent for prose, which may be said to have produced English literary criticism, and which contain passages unsurpassed of their kind. It can hardly, however, be said that his full powers were shown till the appearance, in his fiftieth year, of Absalom and Achitophel. This, with his contribution to its second part, The Medal, Macflecknoe (a satire on the whig Shadwell), and with the didactic poems of Religio Laici (exhibiting the sentiments of a half-sceptical Anglican), and The Hind and the Panther, written after, and to justify his conversion, contain by far the most powerful work of the satiric and didactic kind in English. The rhymed heroic couplet is here adjusted to the purposes of invective, insinuation, and argument with unmatched dexterity, and is charged with an overwhelming force.

Besides these, Dryden exercised himself in various minor kinds, such, for instance, as the preparation of prologues and epilogues for other men's plays as well as his own, and in the composition of Pindaric odes, one of which, that on Mrs Anne Killigrew, shares with his own later 'Alexander's Feast' the position of the best work of this particular kind. He also began the practice of translating the classics, which led finally to the great translation of Virgil already referred to, and to his scarcely less popular Juvenal; and this in its turn led him to what he also called 'translation' of authors other than the classics, such as Chaucer and Boccaccio. These later paraphrases formed the nucleus of the Fables, in which the magnificence, the variety, and the flexibility of his poetical style appear as clearly as its vigour and weight appear in the satires and didactic pieces. The dedication of the Fables in particular, addressed to the Duchess of Ormond, when the author was nearly seventy, has a stately beauty nowhere exceeded. His general poetical characteristics, as far as they can be summed up in a very brief space, may be said to be the faculty of clothing in splendid verse of a pattern quite unknown before him, and never in its own way equalled since, almost any subject that presented itself for treatment. Of inventive, or rather creative origin- ality he had, save as to matters of form, little; and the finest and most ethereal graces of poetry were not his. But he is hardly to be excelled in massive yet not ungraceful splendour of style, and not to be excelled at all in variety of accomplishment. His prose, less splendid than his poetry, is of equal merit as a vehicle of literature, and like his verse, is almost entirely of his own finding out. For a combination of familiarity and finish it has not yet been surpassed.

Dryden's plays appeared in two folio volumes in the year of his death, and were afterwards re-edited by his friend Congreve, in six duodecimos. The Fables, supplemented by most, though not all, of his earlier non-dramatic verse, make another folio volume of the same date. One or two somewhat imperfect editions of his poems appeared during the 18th century; and Malone gave an admirable collection of the prose in four volumes. But all editions were superseded by that of Sir Walter (then Mr) Scott in 1808. This was re-printed in 1821, and in 1883-89 re-edited (in 14 vols.) with additions and corrections by the present writer. Scott's Life is excellent, and is the standard; but the editions of Bell, Mitford, and Christie are useful. The new Aldine edition (by Hooper, 1892) is in 5 vols. Mr Churton Collins edited the Satires in 1893, and Professor W. P. Ker the Essays in 1900. See Dryden in the 'Men of Letters' series (1881) by the present writer, and the notices in Johnson's Lives, in Hazlitt's English Poets, in the first series of Lowell's Among my Books, and in Dr Garnett's Age of Dryden (1896). The section of the British Museum Catalogue on Dryden, separately obtainable, is a full bibliography.